A Brief Meditation on the Cartesian Social Subject
What is the cogito ergo sum of social identity? How can we gain a ‘clear and distinct’ foundation for social identity? What are the facts, that when we begin to try to talk about social identity — we can undoubtedly say we cannot deny?[1]
To begin, I have the fact that I have a perception of myself, and that I believe in a certain perception of myself that I think others have. Then we have the realist twist: we have how people actually perceive me and what I act as though I am. The last one category is sort of strange, but is a foundational idea for Marxist critique of ideology. How do these four ways of perception, or my identities, work? We could, in a sense, play on the word identities here; they are all equal and exactly equivalent to me, and how I am (perceived) as an entity. Or, are these the sum total of the experience that I actually am? Are they each building blocks which, when summed, reveal me? How far does identity relate to the actuality of how I am as a person? What bearing do these categories have on me as a person? To what extent do these relate to my concrete self?
Well, here I’m going to set about a few “movements” that portray the interlinkedness of these different identities. Then, we will need to move on to talking about the interaction between those things: how I perceive others to perceive me and how others actually perceive me. Well, we find a difficulty, in that as soon as someone then adds to my experience (by for example assuring me that I am doing fine, or that people do not see me as a nervous wreck) then I am immediately presented with something within the realm of my experience that is a hint of the actuality of things outside of my self-perception.
Then, we get on to the interesting parts: the self-fulfilling prophecies and the self-negating beliefs. How do these function? Might it be that the state that we believe we are in affects how we actually perceive the world and therefore how we interact with it. Some recent research may indicate that those who identify as feeling “lonely” are more sensitive to what are seen to be ‘threatening,’ or socially threatening signals.[2]Here we may have an interesting example of how it is not just that there is an actuality of how things are and then there is how I perceive it. Because I am actually lonely, I perceive things in a certain way, and my experience of things becomes the experience of thinking that people perceive me in a different way.
So, in this example of the self-fulfilling prophecy, I see my own deficiencies not directly through self-reflection, but how I see myself to be interfacing with the world — how these interactions pan out. Though the way that I interact itself is shaped by the fact that I am perceived through my own eyes to be a certain thing (namely socially inept). So, I perceive that I am a certain way because I perceive that I am a certain way. The logic is absolutely circular. But how do we start off this circle, or any circular movement in fact? How do we get to the “beginning” of this “circle” — a thought which seems paradoxical in itself?
Well, maybe as Descartes puts it, it is caused when I ‘suppose an order among things that do not naturally precede one another’ (Descartes, 11). While I am trying to get to a sort of “truth” about my identity, I take a misstep and believe something untrue — namely that I am socially incapable. I initiate a sort of “self-doubt.” In doubting myself, although I do in fact doubt, the result is that I assert something instead of trying to be impartial. I think that I am in fact doubting that I have the ability to do something, and that in doing this I am doing something negative — but what results is a positive movement. I create a social reality, a subjunctive universe, where I was looking to retract my earlier mistaken or unfounded assertions. Here, I want to look at whether we can distinguish this form of spurious self-doubt that results in something positive from the standard Cartesian doubt (named self-doubt from here on).
When I posit this spurious self-doubt, it is not me retracing and being passive — it is positive, as we have established. There is something truthful in this spurious self-doubt however, namely that I can never fully make a fully accurate picture of how I interact with the outer world. This is obvious in terms of the fact that it is.
The question is whether I am able to patently “determine by what means and how far it is possible to resolve this.” I instead posit a sort of self-doubt that is positive movement. Instead of saying that “I don’t know whether I am socially capable or not,” I positively assert that I am socially inept, or in other cases lonely, or stupid. In this sense, this spurious way of self-doubt manifests itself as creating a social reality, but in a circular fashion. It becomes something positive. Is this a problem with wider Cartesian self-doubt? When I doubt myself, do I end up creating another reality which doesn’t necessarily have a basis in reality?
I submit that Descartes foresaw this flaw in his process of self-doubt, he implores us to be careful in our self-doubt. In his investigation he described that he sets out: ‘like a man who walks alone and in the dark, I resolved to go so slowly and to use so much circumspection in all things that, if I advanced only very slightly, at least I would effectively keep myself from falling’ (Descartes, 10).
The ‘falling’ into mistruth is manifest in this spurious self-doubt, some may resolve to say that it is simply that when we are practicing spurious self-doubt we are in fact doing something negative, as opposed to neutral. In the same three-way distinction that Kant made famous, we can have positive constructive discourse, negative discourse (spurious self-doubt) and Cartesian self-doubt where we remove ourselves from making any judgement; it is a simple “I don’t know.” However, Descartes employs another example which I think shows that at least for his method, this is not the case:
‘before commencing to rebuild the house in which we live, that it be pulled down (…) but as it is likewise necessary that we be furnished with some other house in which we may live commodiously during the operations, so that I might not remain irresolute in my actions, while my Reason compelled me to suspend my judgment’ (Descartes, 10).
So, in trying to practice self-critique, and get to the truth of anything about our identity — we must set a provisional way of looking at things which we can sustain. We need some set of values, and of solid footholds, in which we can set ourselves. Even if they are not true, they give us a platform from which to practice critique — and therefore allow us to build something more truthful. In this sense, the Cartesian method is not entirely negative, neither in the sense of true, nor spurious self-doubt. Since we do not have ‘the full use of our reason from the moment of our birth’ we necessarily have some assumptions that are unfounded. So, whenever we want to build something new, something more founded, we always have to do it from the state of already holding false assumptions. In this case of our identity, this may be ways of doing things, or prejudices, held by our parents or friends that were passed on to us. So, even the exercise of creating a method of arriving at a truth (which, if we are to prevent ourselves from falling into wrong assumptions and spurious self-doubt must require a ‘home’ in which we can do rest) we do actually positively posit beliefs — so that we can create a method by which we arrive at something more truthful. Another one of Descartes’ famous examples here seems to support us:
‘My second maxim was to be as firm and resolute in my actions as I was able, and not to adhere less steadfastly to the most doubtful opinions, when once adopted, than if they had been highly certain; imitating in this the example of travelers who, when they have lost their way in a forest, ought not to wander from side to side, far less remain in one place, but proceed constantly towards the same side in as straight a line as possible, without changing their direction for slight reasons’ (Descartes, 13).
This example is one Descartes commitments that he makes in establishing what his ‘house’ should be like, what moral values he should take up as security whilst he is in the process of rebuilding the destroyed house. This house is the one that has been the subject of the attacks upon the foundations, in which he has ‘rejected as absolutely false everything in which I could find the least doubt’ and thereby demolishing it (Descartes, 14). In order to arrive at a truth in this destroyed house, one must take many presumptions that may be false — but are necessary in order to have a provisional set of beliefs, abode, in which one can live in until one has rebuilt in full one’s own beliefs.
We must make positive movements, to create these provisional beliefs held absolutely from which we can build something more truthful. In the Cartesian method this means momentarily taking up false beliefs which one can return back a simple ignorance in order to build up a bespoke structure of knowledge — knowledge one cannot doubt.
Bibliography
Descartes, René. Discourse On Method And Meditations On First Philosophy. Hackett, 1998.
[1]Though one could certainly try and critique the boundaries of each of these facts, just as one could debate where any object, e.g. a table, begins and ends. Why not call it a plank on top of four legs? However, this pertains to the very fundamental definitions of any inquiry; therefore, the facts that I am trying to grasp must be sort of open-ended facts. These objects are part of what may be said to exist, and the introduction of the idea is not so much the posing of the existence of some entity, but the delineation of the boundaries of human experience into phenomena which we will give some certain name.
[2]Vanhalst, J., Gibb, B. and Prinstein, M. (2015). Lonely adolescents exhibit heightened sensitivity for facial cues of emotion. Cognition and Emotion, 31(2), pp.377–383. Layden, E., Cacioppo, J., Cacioppo, S., Cappa, S., Dodich, A., Falini, A. and Canessa, N. (2017). Perceived social isolation is associated with altered functional connectivity in neural networks associated with tonic alertness and executive control. NeuroImage, 145, pp.58–73. Yoon, K. and Zinbarg, R. (2008). Interpreting neutral faces as threatening is a default mode for socially anxious individuals. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 117(3), pp.680–685.
